Medical needles are designed and manufactured specifically to be extremely sharp and to puncture skin and flesh of a patient with only the slightest force so that the medications may be conveniently administered. Dangers of accidental needle pricking while attending a patient are also well known. Once a needle has been used, it becomes contaminated with the patient's blood and becomes a potential threat, especially for the health care workers, in the spread of infectious diseases. During surgery, handling of these sharp instruments can lead to accidental sticks or puncture wounds exposing the healthcare worker to the infections such as AIDS and hepatitis. Being aware of risks of accidental pricks, health care workers take considerable precautions to avoid any inadvertent pricking by medical needles while attending a patient.
The chances of needle stick are increased during an emergency with several aspects require to be handled. Likewise, during disposal, an exposed needle point may be and usually is a threat to the medical waste handler.
A needle safety device of this kind is generally known and operative as a guard for the tip of a needle of the medical device. However, in some instances they are not entirely automatic requiring some extra effort like push or turn to initiate their operation during use. Such non-automatic needle guards have their obvious flaws such as manual operation of fixing the needle guard, the needle guard existing as a separate piece, difficulty in pushing the guard over the needle tip, loss of time, obvious danger of accidental prick etc.
The existing needle tip guards being the improvements over manually operated needle tip guards also suffer from certain flaws. In the arrangements of automatic needle guards, it has been found that after the needle guard is deployed and the needle with safety device is removed, there is a possibility that the needle guard may slip off/out of the crimp and/or from the hole/slot provided generally proximal to the needle tip. The slipping out may happen, if the needle guard is pulled from the tip or accidentally get pulled. The consequences of an exposed needle tip have already been discussed above.
Therefore, to help prevent health care workers from becoming infected by diseases while attending a patient from an accidental needle prick, there exists a constant need to have an improved needle safety device which without any extra effort automatically covers the tip of an intravenous needle after use and which cannot be pulled off the tip of the needle even under extreme accidental pressure.